Recently in Unicode Category

I just used the Mod Book (like a Tablet PC, but on a Mac) for a meeting, so I thought would write up a few notes before I forgot. Dave has been using his modbook as a sketchpad and has gotten some excellent results, but since I'm not an artist, I thought I would use it as an engineer might to take some notes and add sketches.

Today I took it to a Breeze meeting, and it works fine, but there were some gotchas.

Encryption and Keyboard

The modbook is encrypted with PGP, but PGP needs password input from a keyboard...so a keyboard I requested. My desktop keyboard is too bulky to travel. According to Chris Demcheck PGP requires a keyboard with a USB connection.

In some ways, this is a benefit in disguise because I like being able to switch between Typing (e.g. URLs, passwords) and other modes. However it means that I have to go through an extra step to activate the pen.

FYI - If you don't have a plugin keyboard and you do have an unencrypted Modbook, then you can use the Axiotronic virtual keyboard utility. It puts you in iPhone mode where you tap one letter at a time. Not bad, but it is nice for me to have the working keyboard too since I can type fairly quickly.

Unicode (Of Course)

There is standard Mac OS X Unicode support on the Mod Book. What this means is that if you activate the Greek keyboard then 1) any plugged in keyboard will function as it does on other Macs but 2) the Axiotronic keyboard actually SHOWS you the Greek letters. I'm tempted to see if I can install it on my main Mac as a main reference. I'm not sure how it handles Chinese and other complex scripts, but it's a great start.

The other issue is handwriting recognition. We know that English is possible, but according to InkBook the only other options are French and German (not even Spanish). It's still a young tech.

Inkbook

For note taking, I am using the Inbook app which the company advertises as "Perfect companion for your ModBook". It opens in a format similar to a looseleaf notebook. You can add tabs for pages or section (and color code). The file can be printed as a PDF or saved as text/RTF (I will have to play with that next week).

For note taking, something like InkBook can be useful if your notes are full of weird symbols. Since you are basically handwriting notes, you can write just about anything from graphs and equations to Old Norse runes. Preference wise, I found I liked the calligraphic pen over the regular pencil. I think it forced me to print more clearly, and a little larger.

Quirk wise, I did notice that there was some glare issues with the monitor. I dimmed the lights in 210B (dark on my side) so I could see the monitor. I also propped the modbook on my sweater so i could use the speaker phone and write at the same time.

In terms of workflow, I decided to save my notes as a PDF for this round. I don't have Inkbook installed on my main machine (although you can use it on a normal Mac as long as you also have a Wacom tabler), so the notes do need to be in a format they can use. But at least they're electronic now.

Some Screencaps

I bet you were wondering if I would post any! Here's a portion of my notes with a weird upside down triangle dot symbol (∵) for "because". As you can see my handwriting is not the best, but at least I can read it.

Caption: Notes are trying to convey that engineering students at Abington have 4 exams today (Friday before last week of class) so they can be squeezed before the final week of classes when exams are NOT supposed to happen.

And here's some Old Norse Runes. As you can see, you can change colors of your pens. The top is in the calligraphic pen, but the signature is the regular pencil

While I was Brett's Gaming Commons blog entry on the totally awesome RJDJ interactive music application for the iPhone, my inner geek noticed that the download was actually from http://rjdj.me with the .me domain

I knew about the .tv domain (which is really the South Pacific island Tuvalu), but this was new so I checked it out. The .me domain is in fact from the country Montenegro (one of the many republics formed from the former Yugoslavia), and it has only become available in January 2008. from GoDaddy.com.

By July though, it turned out that GoDaddy was having a little problem sorting out multiple applications for hug.me and other popular .me ideas. It's always great to see how international protocol interacts with the marketplace.

Speaking for the former Yugoslavia though, we did lose a potential domain treasure when their original domain .yu was discontinued. Alas, there will not be any over18funfor.yu sites coming our way any time soon.

I read an interesting article from HTML Goodies reminding me that the switch to XHTML was mostly hype for a long time
http://www.htmlgoodies.com/beyond/xml/article.php/3669451

As Philbin points out, most of the reasons given aren't valid. This is because XHTML and HTML 4 pretty much have the same functionality, so basically:

1. Well formed HTML is as valid as well formed XHTML. HTML Strict is pretty strict by the way - no FONT tags or ALIGN attributes allowed.


2. You can make the same stupid accessibility glitches in either HTML or XHTML (did you know that black on black text is valid code...but illegible?)


3. Browsers will be supporting both HTML and XHTML for many, many years to come.


4. Not all browsers support ad hoc combinations of XML and XHTML.

BUT Philbin did miss one thing that made me switch - XSLT. This is another XML schema which lets you convert non HTML XML into XHTML. But because XSLT is an XML schema, it can only reference another XML file...and only XHTML fits the bill. If you want an XSLT generated page to mesh well with the rest of the site, the entire site should really be in XHTML.

This may be a case of the future is coming, but it really takes 5-10 years for it to arrive.

By the way, Dreamweaver 8 was my "bestest" friend ever in the switch. You open any document, then go to the File menu, then Convert, then pick your format (I recommend XHTML Transitional for beginnners, unless you were already HTML Strict).

Once you do this, Dreamweaver magically converts all <br> tags to <br> tags, and all <img> tags to <img /> (and it adds the pesky slash to all your single line meta tags). It also adds the correct DTD statement (so I'm not having to cut and paste that either). After that your WSYWIG editors is set to produce the XHTML versions of the tags and Dreamweaver valildation is generally picker when it's XHTML so it finds basic glitches much faster.

Now...we just have to worry about XHTML 2!